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West Berlin’s political class was not known for its stellar talent. True, the city had a tradition of dynamic mayors, like Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt, but from the mid-1960s on the best politicians, like the best businessmen, tended to move on rather quickly to higher positions in West Germany after having proven themselves in Berlin. Brandt himself of course left to become foreign minister in 1966. Richard von Weizsäcker, who became West Berlin’s mayor in 1981, moved to the federal presidency in 1984. Hans-Jochen Vogel, the SPD’s chancellor candidate in 1983, served briefly as a caretaker mayor in West Berlin in 1981.

Vogel was sent to Berlin by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to rescue the city for the ruling Social Democrats, who since Brandt’s departure had succeeded in making the town a byword for political incompetence and corruption. With few demands placed on them aside from staying put, West Berlin’s bureaucrats and party hacks got used to doing little real work for their inflated paychecks. When they did stir themselves, it was often to earn additional money in the private sector. Germans call this way of doing things Filz (felt), and though one could find it in every German city (in every city in the world, for that matter), West Berlin had turned it into an art form. Filz-artists were particularly active in the city’s construction industry, whose major companies routinely staffed their boards with municipal politicians. Sometimes, however, the collusion became too intimate even for Berlin. In early 1981 Mayor Dietrich Stobbe (SPD) approved a 115-million-mark loan to a real estate developer named Dieter Garsky for some construction projects that proved fraudulent. The senator for finance, who had also approved the loan, turned out to be on Garsky’s payroll. Stobbe was forced to resign, and Vogel rode in to the rescue. However, neither Vogel nor his successor, Weizsäcker, proved able to root out the deep-seated problems of corruption, feather-bedding, and time-serving mediocrity. West Berlin’s Filz simply could not be transformed into a wholesome broadcloth.

Not surprisingly, the situation in West Berlin inspired resentment throughout the Federal Republic. West Germans often spoke of the walled city as their “hair shirt.” Most had been willing to wear this garment back in the days when West Berlin seemed in imminent danger of being overrun by the Communists, but with the construction of the Wall an odd kind of “normalcy” had set it, and Berlin inspired considerably less empathy. Now it seemed just another big city am Tropf (on the drip), with no end in sight to the dependency. In exchange for their subsidies, moreover, West Germans felt that they got little in the way of thanks from West Berlin. West Berliners, for their part, were at once proud and frightened by their alienation from the Federal Republic. They often insisted that only they could solve Berlin’s problems, yet when West Germans showed little interest in those problems, they felt snubbed. Increasingly, when West Berliners said drüben (over there), they meant West Germany rather than the world just over the Wall.

Little Istanbul

If West Berlin was becoming, at least in the eyes of many West Germans, a shiftless and profligate dependent, the city also seemed to have become unsettlingly foreign, a place where alien cultures and customs were evident at every turn. As we have seen, in former times the German capital had often been regarded as insufficiently “German,” but alleged Überfremdung (loss of native identity due to an influx of foreigners) emerged as a much more pressing issue with the wholesale importation of foreign workers beginning in the 1960s. West Berlin became especially dependent on foreign laborers because the Berlin Wall cut off its supply of German workers from the East. The walled city went from having virtually no foreign workers in 1960 to having 10 percent of its workforce foreign in 1975. By the early 1980s, 12 percent of the population was non-German. Even though other West German cities, such as Frankfurt and Stuttgart, had higher percentages of nonnatives, West Berlin’s dense concentration of foreigners in specific districts made it seem particularly exotic and multicultural.